Synopses & Reviews
Still Writing offers up a cornucopia of wisdom, insights, and practical lessons gleaned from Dani Shapiro's long experience as a celebrated writer and teacher of writing. The beneficiaries are beginning writers, veteran writers and everyone in between.”Jennifer EganFrom Dani Shapiro, bestselling author of Devotion and Slow Motion, comes a witty, heartfelt, and practical look at the exhilarating and challenging process of storytelling. At once a memoir, a meditation on the artistic process, and advice on craft, Still Writing is an intimate companion to living a creative life. Writersand anyone with an artistic temperamentwill find inspiration and comfort in these pages. Offering lessons learned over twenty years of teaching and writing, Shapiro shares her own revealing insights to weave an indispensable almanac for modern writers.
About the Author
Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of the memoirs
Devotion and
Slow Motion, and five novels including
Black and White and
Family History. Her work has appeared in
The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, Vogue, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, and has been widely anthologized. She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, The New School and Wesleyan University, and she is co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. She is a contributing editor at
Travel + Leisure.
Table of Contents
BEGINNINGS
Scars
Riding the Wave
Inner Censor
Corner
A Short Bad Book
A Room of One's Own
Traction
Shimmer
Permission
Reading
Toe Hold
Seeds
The Blank Page
Outsider
Habit
Big Ideas
Getting to Work
Audience of One
Smith Corona
Being Present
Ambition
Fog
Luck
Guides
What You Know?
Piano
Five Senses
Bad Days
Mess
Writing in the Dark
MIDDLES
Building the Boat
Courage
Muses
Trust
Rhythm
Composing
Change
Beginning Again
Tics
Structure
Channel
Second Acts
Ordinary Life
Secrets
Practice
Inheritance
Not Always So
Gravy
The Cave
Control
Reading Yourself
Dumb
Breaking the Rules
Spit
Cigarette Break
Character
Distance
Edges
Mondays
Flow
ENDS
The Best Part
Exposure
Risk
On Having the Last Word
Tribe
Patience
What is Yours
Echo
Break
Dance
Betrayal
Lost Fingers
Steward
Workshop
Astonishment
Envy
Uncertainty
Business
Next
Still Writing
Dani Shapiro on PowellsBooks.Blog
I want to say a few words about impatience. I often tell my students that writers are the most impatient people on the planet, doing the thing that requires more patience than just about anything else. We lay down lines of words like children scratching twigs against wet sand near the shoreline. The waves come and erase what we’ve written...
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Dani Shapiro on PowellsBooks.Blog
In the spring of 2016, I stumbled entirely by accident on a massive family secret. My father — whom I adored, and who died when I was young — hadn’t been my biological father. I made this discovery because I had my DNA tested through a commercial testing site. There was no reason for me to do this...
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